Organizations may collect data out in the field for various tracking and auditing purposes. For example, field data may provide an objective record of evidence that can be used for regulatory compliance, maintenance, quality control, safety observance, and tracking other operations. Traditionally, field data has been collected using physical documents, images, drawings, and forms that are filled out by hand in the field. Once the physical forms are filled out to collect the field data, the physical forms may be kept in a physical file, for example. In another example, the physical forms may be manually converted into digital records that are stored in a tracking computer. Such an approach for collecting field data may be largely inefficient, because the field data may not be easily extracted from the physical forms and transformed into digital records that can be tracked and audited. Moreover, filling out the physical forms by hand may be error prone. Further, transcribing the physical forms to digital records may add an additional step that can result in transcription errors.
Various attempts have been made to collect field data in a manner that is more accurate and efficient relative to the legacy forms that are filled out by hand. In one example, a physical form is replaced by a software application to collect field data. The software application presents a graphical user interface (GUI) having a question/answer format. In particular, input fields of the physical form may be extracted from the existing visual layout of the physical form and transformed into a series of questions. A field operator may provide answers to the questions to collect field data. The question/answer format may provide a standard input method that may be applied across different types of legacy forms.
Furthermore, the software application may be optimized for presentation on a mobile computer, such as a laptop, tablet, or smartphone that may be operated out in the field. Accordingly, field data may be directly collected in a digital format that may be more easily stored as digital records relative to a legacy physical form that is filled out by hand, and then transformed into a digital record.
However, in many cases, the visual layout of the legacy forms may play a significant role in the collection of field data. For example, the layout of physical forms used in the field may be approved by administrators as complying with policies, procedures, and standards of an organization or regulatory agency. In some cases, deviation from such visual layouts may result in a failure to comply with requirements for records management and retention. Accordingly, in some cases, field data collected using the above described question/answer format would have to be re-mapped into a custom output file that mirrors the visual layout of the legacy form in order to comply with such requirements. This additional step may reduce the efficiency gained by using the question/answer format to collect field data.
Furthermore, in some cases, the visual layout of a legacy form may remain unchanged for a substantial period of time, such that the visual layout is easily recognized by many experienced field operators. As such, converting the layout to a question/answer format may cause a barrier to adopting the software application to collect field data. In particular, field operators may be hesitant to switch formats, because the question/answer format may be less intuitive relative to the known quantity of the legacy form. Moreover, even if the question/answer format is adopted for collecting field data, efficiency of data collection may be reduced, at least temporarily, because the field operators may be less familiar with the visual layout of the question/answer format relative to the visual layout of the legacy form.